2 Things of Significance

 

It really gets harder and harder to think about things to write about. I'm sure there are a million things i could describe or go through, but some of the time it will end up making my company look negative or me look slightly dodgy, even if this is not the case, so i avoid mentioning things in that manner.

However the first thing of significance. I 'almost' had my first engine failure, shutdown, emergency blah blah whatever you want to call it last week. I was flying a C402c for the first time in a while. I was doing the standard overflow from the Metro down to Pork Keats, and had 5 people on board. It was not a heavy payload at all, and i only had 800 pound of fuel on board. As i advanced the throttles forward, there was definately something that felt odd in the right engine, but i didn't recognise it as a safety issue, as i still had full power on the gauges, the engine gauge indications were normal and i had not flown a C402c in nearly 3 months!

As i rotated the aeroplane climbed normally and with full power there was a bit of vibration, but again, i kept putting it down to that i was not familiar with a C402, figured as a reduced power it would go away, and that maybe the props weren't as synced as they could be. As i reduced the power and synced the props, the vibrations were becoming worse and worse and all of a sudden it felt like there was a problem. I was climbing through around 2000ft at this point on a heading of 250 after take off from Darwin 29. I suddenly thought that maybe there was too much fuel going into the engine and tried leaning it a tad. Bad choice! The engine coughed and spluttered and i felt the yawing in the airframe and the engine decided it did not want to spin. As i put the fuel pumps on, and put the mixture back to full, it started spinning again, although the vibrations were extreme at this point, to the point where the control column was shaking and moving back and forth a centimetre or two, reasonably violent.

At this point i was 2,500ft and requested return to Darwin, ops normal, but with possible engine trouble. Even as i was reducing power for landing, and slowing the plane for landing configuration, the vibrations continued, and possibly got worse (but that just may have been my nerves at this point!) I made a landing without any real concern and taxiied back to base. Although the maintenance guys ran it up, they couldn't fault it on the ground, and i realised the issue had been raised in the previous 3 days that the plane had been experiencing similar problems. After they pull parts of the engine out, it was discovered that a few the fuel injectors on the right engine were blocked. I had to fly the same plane empty down to Tindal that afternoon and was extremely jumpy about it  as you can imagine. It was really bad weather on departure (well the entire flight was pretty bad due weather, storms everywhere - whent he inbound Qantas 737's are doing 180 degree turns to avoid the storms) but everything was normal and the plane operated fine after they replaced the injectors. 

The other part of significance, is i finally got my 100 hours of night command, and can finally get my ATPL license. The min requirements for an Australian ATPL license is 1500TT where 250 has to be command, i think the rest can be ICUS or co-pilot, and 750 needs to be in a VH registered aircraft. It also required 75 hours in IMC, and 100 hours night command, ICUS or co-pilot. I had the other requirements for a long time, but getting night in the top-end charter business is not easy. There are no night contracts really, and the one that we have is on a Metroliner. The C441 do a bit of night doing charter work from time to time, same as the Barons. But the C404 rarely does any night charters. But luckily, due to a late arriving aircraft, and then another return to Darwin due passenger request, we ended up being nearly 2 hours late for the job. So when he finally completed the job it was on last light, and i was able to depart for the 300nm leg home at night. So pretty happy.

Im very, VERY close to turning a new page in my aviation career, but no news on a start date as yet!

Thanks for reading.